$50,000 is on the higher end of the spectrum for teachers. In Texas, the starting teacher salary is around $38,000. Plus, teachers have to provide their own supplies, be at the school by 7 am every day, stay late helping with extracurriculars / helping students, and work late grading among other things.
The frustrating part about Uber is that I have to wait 10 minutes for each one before they refuse to take me somewhere. With a taxi I can just walk down the row of taxis at the airport. On the other hand, the only reason taxis can get that benefit is because they lobby so hard to kick the Ubers out to a parking lot 10 minutes away.
I tried to go from SFO to South Bay a while back around midnight and eventually took a cab after being cancelled by multiple Uber drivers. Some even called me, asked where I was going, then angrily said they don't go to South Bay and cancelled.
Computer Science is a new field and individual developers can have reaching effects on society, direct or indirect, that extend further than any other engineering discipline. My belief is that it 100% is on the responsibility of researchers and developers to think of the ethical and social implications of their work. As an example, a podcast I listened to recently was interviewing CS researchers working on "deep fake" videos. When asked if they thought their work could have negative societal impact, their response was along the lines of "its just really cool to make this". CS as a whole has a lot of maturing to do and I hope we can get their sooner rather than later.
There is definitely room for improvement among pay in Canada, but it really is an exceptionalist view to base the pay in USD. Especially so because I always see people convert salary in CAD to USD, then not convert the cost of goods and living to USD as well. There are also certain nuances living in Canada that decrease your expenses compared to the US such as decent public transit (unheard of in the west coast), decent healthcare of which health benefits from the company then boost the healthcare quality way higher than what I was able to find in America, and a much more collectivist culture than America which, in my opinion, is the biggest draw to living in Canada.
On the other hand, there are expenses that are higher! Taxes are higher for one as well as the cost of goods such as groceries. Although, the groceries case doesn't really hold because I find that groceries in SV or Seattle to be higher than where I am now in Canada.
The main point I'm trying to make is that is that straight up converting salary in another country straight to USD is a bad comparison of wealth.
I understand how great this is, but does anyone else get a little upset when GCP, AWS, and Azure are able to buy their way into a market and are pretty much guaranteed to hurt the small players in the infra tooling market?
eh, i don't know about that one. In most countries outside of America, "engineer" is a reserved word for licensed engineers and Software Engineers can not legally call themselves engineers, thus developers.
How does Shopify not give enough control? Anyone can write Shopify apps to extend extra features with their API or pay someone to create an app (less than paying someone for a full ecommerce site)
As someone in their 20s I'm always amazed (and i'm sure my peers in the same age group are) by how many people become somewhat famous on Instagram. The people doing it usually don't have jobs that could find the kind of lifestyles they portray, so where do they get this money from?
It's a good thing for business, yes, but there are a lot of ethical implications surrounding socioeconomic/behavioural predictions. I've been getting the feeling recently that Facebook has successfully circumvented decades of regulation on human studies since their research isn't (correct me if I'm wrong) governed by the Institutional Review Board
Musk's idea is _incredible_ and I really think it has the potential to take off with American car culture. However, I think that might be it's biggest downfall, too. In many aspects, from environmentally friendliness to ridership growth, I think mass public transit would scale better than individuals owning their own vehicle.